How to instil proper governance surrounding your organisation's performance management setup
Conducting virtual performance review meetings
August 2020
The article was originally authored by Christian Frantz Hansen.
In times of turbulence, it is essential that you keep cadence and pace of your performance management initiatives to limit the effects of the turmoil on your performance management procedures. Going virtual will help you in this process, and we propose five steps for you to take to make the most of your virtual performance review meetings.
Running a tight ship is a critical part of making it through rough seas. Thus, to bring your organisation through the turbulent times, it is essential that you limit the effects on performance management procedures. If the usual performance reviews are halted, your organisation risks losing track of where you are headed – with potential catastrophic consequences as a result.
A simple yet effective way to keep the cadence and pace of your organisation’s performance management initiatives is to conduct virtual performance review meetings. This, however, necessitates that your performance management organisation knows how to leverage virtual tools and facilitation techniques.
“Whether driven by the current COVID-19 lockdown, geographical distance or other barriers, performance review meetings can easily be conducted virtually.”
To make the most of a virtual performance review meeting, we suggest that you work your way through the five steps below.
It is critical that you convey a simple and intuitive purpose of the meeting in order to ensure alignment and common ground among the participants. You should make sure that everybody attending the virtual performance review knows and understands the intent/objective. In a virtual meeting, it can be difficult to dissect people’s mannerisms and body language, and you must therefore make your message even clearer than usual.
To make the purpose of the virtual review meeting clear, you can ask yourself:
It is always important to consider which participants to include in your meetings to ensure the necessary competences, decision authority and operational insight.
At a performance review meeting, the choice of participants is particularly important. Here, you should always include employees who have the authority and ability to act on the performance insights. Because if a performance review does not lead to any action, it creates very little value.
To choose which participants to include in your performance review meeting, you can ask yourself:
To create the best virtual environment, it is important that you recognise the pros and cons of different virtual communication tools, i.e. that Microsoft Teams is good for smalls groups, Skype is good for medium-sized groups, and Zoom is preferable for larger groups. It’s important that you select the right communication tool that supports the discussions, collaboration and decision-making you wish to create at your performance review.
When looking into different virtual tools, you can ask yourself:
If you want to ensure engagement and active participation in a virtual setup, it is important that you involve your participants regularly through deliberately designed exercises and microinvolvements.
Thus, you must make sure that your participants are actively involved much more frequently in a virtual meeting than is needed in physical meetings. You most effectively achieve a high level of involvement by leveraging features such as virtual whiteboards, polls, quizzes and virtual breakout rooms.
When you prepare the format of your virtual meeting, you can ask yourself:
In virtual meetings, you run the risk of what is called the diffusion of responsibility. This is a sociopsychological phenomenon whereby everyone assumes that someone else will take responsibility for action. Being distanced from each other, people unfortunately tend to hide behind their cameras and take less responsibility for action.
As a virtual facilitator, you must therefore outline clear roles for all participants. In this way, you make sure that everyone feels obligated to take responsibility for acting on the performance insights in the review meeting.
When outlining clear roles for all virtual participants, you can ask yourself:
Benjamin Franklin once said: “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” And from experience, we know that proper preparation for a virtual meeting requires twice the time compared to what is needed for a traditional physical meeting. Thus, you must make sure that you set aside the extra time for preparation before going virtual with your performance review meetings.